The Waning Dark
by Grym
Summary: Jack Hawksmoor and the Midnighter take a brief sojourn in Sarajevo.


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Disclaimer: Standard fare. Characters are the property of Wildstorm Comics and created by the frightening, fascinating muse of Warren Ellis. If you haven't read "The Authority" yet, you're missing out. Nuff said.

Acknowledgements: I'm deeply in debt to Kamots (for patience, humor, and "Holy catnap!"), DuAnn Cowart (All hail the Goddess of Beta-reading), Babbles29, and Carma Sari. Thank you all for your encouraging yet critical reads!

Feedback: Please! Gathered eagerly in, considered and danced around. All critical comments welcomed! Feed the mailbox at [grym@mindspring.com][1].

Synopsis: Jack Hawksmoor and the Midnighter take a brief sojourn in Sarajevo after their battle with Regis ("Authority #8").

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**The Waning Dark**

The broken city whimpered beneath a shroud of dirt and smoke. Dun-colored fog rose from the battleground of alleys and crept through battered streets, almost blocking out the moon. A mirror of its embattled populace, Sarajevo's streets laughed the hysterical, manic laugh of near-insanity; its windows gaped thirstily at the hidden sky, longing, screaming for succor. Perched on the ruin of a warehouse chimney, Jack Hawksmoor crouched and held his head in hands, listening to the agony that rose around him with the midnight fog, teeth gritted against the urge to wail with the city. 

The victim of repeated alien abductions and alterations as a child, Jack's preternatural sympathy with the metropolitan areas of the earth set him off from the rest of humanity. He communed with them and they, in turn, embraced him in welcoming arms, nurturing him and nourishing him like a beloved son. He felt the parasites that afflicted them and raged against those parasites – pushers, thieves, murderers single and corporate – on behalf of his cities. His recent alliance with the superhuman agency, the Authority, might have widened his influence, but he always wanted to come "home" to the sad, vibrant, loving cities of this world. 

His stance shifted slightly when he brought his fists down from throbbing temples, shivering with the effort of restraining his horror and outrage to better comfort dying Sarajevo. He traced his thumbs over the scorched brick and crumbling metal beneath him, gently, promising aid. Flecks of ash clung to his loose black suit, to the torn white t-shirt beneath. Red in the darkness, his gaze wandered over the rusted tin roof several feet below, past gutters filled with ash, to empty streets, and roved back again. He blinked, a brief flicker in the night, and sighed. It was easy to forget he wasn't alone tonight.

Below, his back to the chimney and his legs thrown out haphazardly, the other man sat lost in his own dark mood. Thick combat boots still smeared with grime, black leather trenchcoat bristling with buckles, heavy gloves replete with back-hooking spikes, the Midnighter was a shadow among shadows and unnaturally still. Half of his face was buried under a dark cowl, now ripped at the left side of the jaw. He had surprised Jack by volunteering to join him tonight, but the company was welcome and offered a human counterpoint to the city's trouble. Although Jack knew very little about the Midnighter, the man was a stalwart fighter; his tactical computer-enhanced brain and seething mean-streak made him invaluable in battle. Their recent tag team endeavor against the monstrous blue dictator of Sliding Albion had proven that. 

Their skirmishes tonight against Serbian marauders, child's play compared to Regis, were mere moments to be savored and remembered in stills: the new light in the fear-deadened eyes of a toddler reunited with her sisters; or the wild, tear-filled abandon of the overjoyed mother. Jack smiled. The image of the family, clustered and clinging to the Midnighter's stooped, black form, would linger more pleasantly than the dull crunch of shattered cartilage and bone, the smell of blood mingled with gunpowder. Parasites excised without mercy.

Staring around him into the hurt stillness of an evening standoff, rare for this city, Jack made an attempt at smalltalk. "I can't seem to wash his stink out of my hair."

Below, his colleague glanced up, resituated himself slightly. The scrape of leather against rust was only marginally more pleasant than the voice that followed, edged and rough. "Regis?" The Midnighter growled the name.

"Who else?"

Beneath his mask, thin lips quirked in a half grin that faded almost immediately. "I can still taste blood. Mine, this time. Couple of fractured ribs, I think. Crushed bone beneath my eye."

"You should have the Doctor see what he can magic up for that."  


"Not necessary. A little rest and I'll heal well enough."

"Don't trust him?" Jack asked.

"Don't trust many people." 

The answer was vaguely evasive, but Jack shrugged it off. "So, why aren't you resting, then? Jenny'll shove those broken cheekbones down your throat and into your gullet if she guesses you're still fighting when you need to be recuperating."

A grim chuckle echoed faintly along the tin roof. "Keeps Apollo from getting a firsthand view of the bruises. He nags like an old woman." Voices and footsteps rang below in the darkened alley, growing and fading slowly into the distance. The Midnighter shifted again, an awkward motion out of sync with his usual lethal grace. "That and I – ah – I haven't said thank you yet."

Toes lightly finding crevices that would not support a bird, much less a man, Hawksmoor walked down the chimney. The cracked bricks cradled his heels, the city's war-polluted air buoying him upright in an uncanny imitation of walking on a softly sloped road, not a fully perpendicular wall. He dropped beside the other man with the grace of a cat, crouching to wave away the half-offered thanks. "Just doing my job."

The Midnighter's long silence was sullen, a passive protest. 

In response, Jack's lips curved in a mirthless smile, teeth glittering white in the wolf-brown fog. "You kept him occupied until I could get in touch with the city, build the anger to do what I did." He shook his head in undisguised disgust. "Still nauseates me. And I should be above feeling sick in pitched battle these days. Without you there to distract him, I would've—"

"Done just as well," the Midnighter interrupted with a snort. 

Jack looked at him closely for a moment before tumbling down the pitted roof. The tin creaked faintly and seemed to propel him into the air in a dancer's sprawling leap that left him lightly on the roof of the neighboring building. His voice carried as if he hadn't moved. "Does that bother you?"

The other man tilted his masked head, fragments of sickly moonlight skimming over its surface like oil. "No," he replied at last. "I'm glad you're capable of doing the job."

"Agreed." Jack rolled into an unnatural handstand, legs tucked, balancing on the splayed fingers of one hand, and dropped over the edge of the building into the street several stories below. 

The Midnighter arched one eyebrow slightly and closed his eyes, glad to let the conversation dissipate. Although he wouldn't mention it, Regis' uncanny ability to read his enhancements, to predict the lightning calculations and overpower his strikes, had been unsettling. A few more moves and Apollo would have come home to empty quarters for good.

He closed his eyes, willing his breathing to slow and steady into a sleep pattern, and tried to rest. Strange, to find rest in this war-ravaged land while safety and companionship waited somewhere between dimensions on the Carrier. Apollo's desperate embrace then they met again after fulfilling dangerous separate parts of the mission had mingled sharp pain and sharp relief. It wouldn't be long before the other man realized how hurt he was, but for the moment, Apollo had been dragged down to help the Engineer with some mechanical nonsense and the Midnighter had escaped to serve as Hawksmoor's "back up." He'd deal with the worry and the injuries later.

Somehow, even broken ribs felt better when you were successfully kicking in heads.

Ten minutes passed. A siren shrilled in the distance. The barking chatter of machine gun fire punctuated it erratically as if in ironic emphasis. The Midnighter assumed that Jack was off trailing bitter-eyed teen looters or, at worst, staring at the images captured in the city's shattered windows. Strange power, he mused. Alien. 

Twenty minutes fled into the darkness. Exhaustion dragged at his chest like the weight of Regis' body pressing against him, cutting off movement. Chaining him with sedating breath. His head nodded slightly, his chin resting on the leather of his coat. Hawksmoor would call if he wanted help, he decided, allowing his dark eyes to hood, then close.

Thirty minutes. The dreams began to come. They stole around the edges of his uneasy, shallow sleep, boiling to the surface and filled with the shades of events only dimly remembered and the engulfing blackness of the gaps in between.

Fluorescent lights pierced his eyes, cruel fingers biting into his wrists as calm voices nattered somewhere above the haze of drugs and pain. He roared, twisted his body in the hard restraints, feeling the sticky warmth of blood – his -- flowing between his fingers. His ears rang with the sound of his own voice shrieking an inhuman scream that went on and on even as his numb mind strove to stifle it. As he writhed, helpless and confused, something warm and wet fell on his face. It trickled down his nose, filling the creases of pain, pooling in the corner of his lips. Salty. Tears? 

The nightmare lulled. He shifted restlessly, enhanced brain processing thousands of options, all rejected. Who would cry for him, a back-street soldier--half-volunteer, half-prisoner, only half-willing to undergo the tortures in hopes of making something of his life? No Apollo in this pain-besieged world. Then who? Sleep wrapped its arms about him, suffocating.

In his dreams, he could still feel the hands creeping over his body, slashing, prodding, stabbing sensor arrays between bones and layers of carbonized muscle, the dizzying agony of the experimental surgeries, the cold weight of the Surgeon's fingers scrabbling at his face. The horror. The fear. The bestial need to flee overtaking and subsuming his sedated mind. Run. Kill. He snarled, whirling, slipping in the antiseptic dark, struggling against invisible hands, trying futilely to fight. Run.

With a choked shout, the Midnighter slammed into wakefulness, body wire-taut and already half on his feet, poised to attack. Within nanoseconds, his combat headcomp geared back to reality and he knew the danger for what it was: only the phantoms that clutched at him most nights, the ghostly talons of memory that made him jerk awake even when held in Apollo's peaceful embrace. Tonight, however, it was the shooting fire in his chest that rapidly brought him back to the present. He crouched, panting, concentrating on the feel of the weak roof buckling slightly beneath his weight and on ignoring pain both real and remembered.

"Holy catnap, Batman" came Hawksmoor's dry voice from above him. He had returned, once more hunched in the strangled play of moonlight and gritty shadows.

Teeth clenched, a sudden growl stretching in his throat, the Midnighter shot a dour look up at the chimney behind him. "Now, _**his**_ ass I would've kicked." 

"You have to admit, the similarities between you and the bat—Hmmm. What aren't you telling us?" Jack grinned. "If you're going to use Midnighter as your proper name, you'll need another code name. How about Bats? The Caped Crusader?" He savored the idea. "The Dark Knight?"

The Midnighter was suddenly conscious of the wet trails streaking from beneath his mask, dripping from his chin into the foggy dark. _Tears?_ He faded backward into the shadows, not responding to the rough chuckle above him as he mopped one glove across his lower face abruptly. 

After a moment, the distant siren howled again, the sound lingering in the quiet air like smoke. 

"Nights are hell." Hawksmoor's casual voice was more subdued. Although his focus continued to range outward through innumerable city streets, he recognized the furtive gesture below at the periphery of his vison. Familiar. Conjuring up childhood afternoons alone with unseen tears.

The Midnighter was silent.

"I know about nights," Jack continued, his tone softly confessional. "They come back at night, the aliens." His laugh was short, bitter. Red-lit eyes stared over the fractured, sooty rooftops. "And Angie wonders why I never sleep. I don't need to, if I can come here to the city. The city's horror is so much more manageable than my own."

Slumping into the deeper dark beneath the chimney, the Midnighter flexed his hands, still trying to shake the familiar afterimages of his dream. "Rough for a kid, I imagine," he muttered.

A polluted wind lifted the words to Jack's ears. Knowing the need for shadow and pseudo-solitude, he continued to stare around him through the dense air, not looking down at the figure in the darkness. "Rough for anyone. Of all people, we two should know."

"Yes." The word was hard, pushed out of jaws that ached with physical pain and reluctance to remember. Somehow, putting words to the past solidified it in the nightmarish looming dark. Even Apollo did not know the depth of that story. After five years of haunting the streets as vigilantes, hiding from Henry Bendix, the words still refused to come in full. Apollo, who had also undergone the Surgeon's alterations but he had been willing, even eager. 

Gingerly, the Midnighter pulled one of his gloves free, flexing pale, strong fingers in the air. He rubbed lightly over the scars that crisscrossed them, pressed his gloved thumb against the thickened skin that trailed the veins of his inner wrist. Needle tracks. Scalpel carvings. Reminders of the Surgeon's endeavors and of his own brutal attempts to escape. The Midnighter shivered in the suddenly cool night.

Jack glanced down at him and nodded in grim understanding, the city shadows thinning for his eyes. "Clumsy work, that. Or, hell, maybe my youth helped me. My scars weren't visible for long."

Instinctively, the Midnighter covered his exposed hand from view, but Jack could tell that he continued to work the fingers idly, curling them into claws, then a fist. It surprised him when the gruff voice replied, slow, faintly hesitant. "If the Surgeon had been sober, things might've gone better. Or if I hadn't changed my mind."

Hawksmoor sat on the chimney's edge, dangling his treaded feet about a meter above the other man. "Know the feeling, sort of. I didn't have much of a choice, myself." He chuckled wryly. "My folks did, but that's neither here nor there these days. Guess they had their reasons."

"Forgiving of you." Mild surprise colored the words.

"Not really," Jack replied, grimacing. "They're dead. It all evens out in the end."

The Midnighter considered, listening to the sounds of the waning dark. Jack's peculiar breathing above. The whimper of a child several blocks over. "Revenge is more satisfying," he said finally, showing a flash of teeth. "Death is only a band-aid if it doesn't come from your own hand."

It was Jack's turn to fall silent. The Midnighter wondered suddenly how Jack's parents had met their end.

"Revenge isn't as important when there are other compensations." Jack stuffed his hands into his black pants pockets, arms hanging loosely akimbo as he spoke. "The aliens took my eyes, my lungs, my skin in part. If you get right down to it, they took part of my soul. But they gave me a fragment of the city's soul in return. I lost my trust in parents, but the city's foster care fed me in ways no human parent ever could. No disappointments. No disagreements. Perfect, powerful. In retrospect, I wouldn't trade that for a measure of normalcy. Some sacrifices are worth a fraction of humanity."

The Midnighter pulled his glove on again, wriggling his fingers experimentally and concentrating as if the motion was somehow incredibly important, as if thinking about something else would take the sting out of the words he wanted to say. "I'd give my eyeteeth to get my hands around the Surgeon's neck. Hell, just to be in the same room with him." His grin was slow, without humor. "Watch him run, climb the walls, tear his fingers to bone as he tried to escape."

"Is that what you dreamt about?"

The Midnighter flinched, found himself glad for the shadows. "Revenge? Yes," he lied.

"Not revenge. Escape." Jack tucked his legs up, perched and balanced like Buddha, surrounded with uncertain hazy highlights cast by the moon as it slid behind the warehouses. "I've heard the Doctor talk about narcotics withdrawal, the hallucinations, the nightmares. My dreams" Coarse laughter. "My dreams make those look like the peaceful rest of country children."

Restraining straps seized his wrists. An icy hand slammed his head back against the metal table with a deafening crunch. The Midnighter closed his fist. Above him, Jack continued, his words conjuring images and sensations half-real, half-nightmare.

"The city suffers from nightmares every day, every night. This one especially. But it's not alone. From here to America, cities know both the ecstasy of joy and the horror of despair. Fantasies and nightmares abound. Hopefully the nightmares don't outweigh the other."

"Cities tell you this?" the Midnighter muttered. 

"Yeah." Hawksmoor rested his back against the charred and crumbling flue. Bits of ash flaked away, but it held him gently in its fragile grasp. "Their stories live in whispers of smoggy wind, shift and move in every pane of glass – even shattered ones like these. Nightmares replay in puddles in the street. Horrible things. Cities remember when they long to forget. Because they have to. Because life goes on even as the tears of acid rain fall." He stopped, once more sliding his palm over the brick soothingly. The metallic tang of blood reminded him that this city's nightmare roiled around them as they rested.

Silence. Gunfire nearby. The echo of running footfall.

When the words came, they were flat, uninflected and brittle. "I remember little, except at night," the Midnighter rasped softly. "It comes in flashes." _The sickening whirr of bone saws. _"I hear I volunteered, seduced by promises of power. Doesn't matter now. I hardly recall who I was before the mods, but I do remember anger. Hate." He rubbed his masked forehead, as if the act of remembering pained. "After the Surgeon's work, Apollo tells me my recovery was slow, but I only have snatches of that. And scars. That bastard Bendix was there feeding me the line that brought me to him. Vengeance. Vengeance against the world." 

"Apollo wanted to save the world. I wanted to destroy it," he continued, pushing away surprise at his need to talk, garnering the comfort of the shadows, the distance, the other man's subtle but knowing empathy. "That's why they didn't seed this body with invulnerability, I understand. Made it easier to kill if I ever turned against the hand that fed me." His lip curled in a voiceless snarl. "At the time, I was too weak to understand, too glad that the pain wasn't so blinding anymore to care about their reasons. Or to resist the "psychotherapy." They used the pain to plant triggers, easy recall mechanisms for their hound. Easy control and collaring." He paused. "But not so easy as they thought." Quieter. "Sometimes I stumble over them even now."

Jack listened, unmoving, his eyes roving about the ravaged skyline. He sensed rather than saw the Midnighter drawing his heavy trenchcoat tighter around him, protection against the early morning chill. "Cold?"

"Always. Part of the mod for the computer." He made a disgusted noise. "They fed my hate, then replaced it with a tactical battle computer that analyzes every breath of every body in my vicinity. Let me keep a taste for killing, gave me thousands of options for successful destruction, and somehow – perhaps accidentally -- tweaked the conscience behind it. I suppose I actually owe Bendix for that one. For the team training " Jack could hear the "for Apollo" that lingered unsaid in the city's vaguely precognitive wind, but the Midnighter went on. "If what I recall is the truth. And that's a damn big if."

"But you still believe in revenge."

"In the right circumstances."

"I never wanted to kill." Jack looked at his hands, broad and well-callused, a working-man's hands. Black blood crusted around the nails.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Before Stormwatch, even, I found myself doing it more and more to protect the cities. Hated it. But pimps don't reform in prison. Junkies spread like a cancer over the sidewalks, choking the cities one street at a time. Wish I could let you hear the city sigh when another hitman becomes the mark, or the relieved laughter as any little nightmare ends."

"I think I know that sound." It was the sound that rang in both their ears, silently internal, when Regis died. Exploded, rather. As the stench of blood and entrails assailed them, it was the sound of pasts eradicated and futures plodding steadfastly onward. It was whoever they were now, doing whatever needed to be done. For revenge. For the cities. For the world that needed saving.

"I thought you might." Jack smiled.

After a long moment, the Midnighter stood and stretched slowly, protecting his sore ribs. "Well, that's enough for tonight, I think. I'm stiffening up nicely. Might not be so bad to take a break. Door." A swirling slash of gold opened in front of him, doorway back to the Carrier. "Time to face the music back home."

"Jenny?"

"Apollo. He's too maternal for my own good." The Midnighter smirked. "But I think can bribe him not to tell Jenny I've been hurt."

Jack chuckled wryly, started to ask another question and then stopped himself abruptly. He shook his head. "Never mind. I don't really want to know how."

As the Midnighter stepped through into another world, Jack was sure he heard an almost amused mutter of "Narrow-minded bastard. Caped Crusader, my bat-ass."

Sliding from his perch with preternatural grace, Hawksmoor followed, whispering a silent goodbye to Sarajevo. A silent promise to return. And silent thanks. The Carrier Door vanished, leaving a city that sang quietly to itself in a few small streets. A song of hope for the end of nightmares.

**_~FIN~_**

   [1]: mailto:grym@mindspring.com



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